What is happening?
Even in all the chaos, even as she pressed her back against the double-doored closet to keep it shut, Mrs. Goodman smiled, proud of herself. She had self-censored even in her own head. As every good kindergarten teacher must.
What she really meant to think was, “What the hell is happening?” A ridiculous question. What was happening was impossible. Against her back, she sensed a series of thuds and a growing pressure pushing outward, against her. She leaned back in response with all her weight, her shoulder blades, her buttocks, even the small of her back. She had thrown herself against the handles of the two doors. It hurt, but there was no way she was going to allow what was in there to get out.
She tried to call out for help, but September stifled her efforts. After a relaxing summer of not having to talk over five-year-olds and shout over the roar of the mob during recess, her voice had convalesced back to a normal instrument. But at the start of the school year, communicating with a new group of playful, noisy children had reduced that voice to a rasp by the end of each day. And this–this situation–had left her mouth and throat drier, weakening the rasp to nothing more than a whisper.
She was exhausted, a given at this time of year. Setting a routine for the students was a Herculean task. And more than the mere fatigue of a single day, doing this for thirty years had taken a cumulative toll as well. Thank goodness this was the last year.
The final year. Only 170 days left. Then retirement.
Too bad John wouldn’t be there to enjoy it with her. She sniffled back the emotion, giving herself enough spit to swallow.
She took a deep breath, raised her arm, glanced at her wrist then slammed it back against the closet door. 4:05. As the door pushed against her, her focus darted about the room. Five minutes ago, her kindergarten classroom had stood back in order from the day’s earlier chaos, prepared for tomorrow’s whirlwind of activity. The next day’s art project had been almost ready on the big table along the side of the room.
In another hour or so and she would have been gone, as most of the teachers already had. Staying late was just part of the job if you wanted to do it right. She did and had since starting her career. Many of those earlier students now had children of their own and requested “Mrs. G” by name. She loved her students. My kids. She tried to teach them everything — from handwriting, to reading, to counting to a hundred — but most important of all was being a good and helpful friend. Through the closet door, she felt the scratching before she heard it. She needed to teach this child, the grunting wild child on the other side of the closet doors, how to calm down. What to do?
She closed her eyes to concentrate. A mistake. She saw it all again in her mind. Those fingers. No. Talons. Her eyes snapped open again. Relax, she told herself. The child. Focus on the child. Breathe into the rainbow, breathe out through your heart.
Calming down was becoming more and more difficult for her students to learn. It had started, of course, with what she had noted over the years: deteriorating parenting skills. First there was gentle parenting, then free-range parenting, then permissive parenting. More like neglectful parenting, she thought.
She had never struck either of her own boys, and she would never strike one of “her kids.” Limits need to be set, however, and “No” is an appropriate word to use. But some of these parents would never say “No.” Never say “No” to tantrums, never say “No” to pushing, never saying “No” to grabbing what isn’t theirs, never saying “No” to hitting or biting or anything. She breathed, trying to slow her heartbeat, which she could feel thud, thud, thudding in her ears. These parents never said “No” to anything, including–especially–those damned screens.
Then, of course, the pandemic bloomed in the spring of ‘20, and any hope of socialization for these children withered on the vine. She glanced at her laptop on the big table and remembered the first year of the pandemic and how she had to teach kindergarten to her students via Zoom. Because it was spring, that meant that there were only three months left in the school year, but more importantly, she had already introduced them to their tablets, had shown them to how the technology worked, so that when they were sequestered at home, forced to use technology to communicate with the class, they could.
The thudding Mrs. Goodman felt had moved from her ears to her chest. She shook her head to reset her thoughts.
The following fall had been different, and trying to begin that year with technology for her students, a few as young as four, a fool’s errand. She hadn’t had the time to front-load that information for her students, but love had bonded them. They made it through the year, she and her children.
She realized the thudding didn’t emanate from her chest at all, but from her back. From behind her back. From inside the closet. Bile rose up her throat. Without knowing it, she had relaxed her body, her back no longer pressed flat against the closet’s double doors. She knew this because she could sense sweat trickling down the small of her back. She inhaled through her nose, tasting the metallic scent, and pushed it out, slow, steady, through her pursed lips. Think, damnit. Think of the kids.
When the students came back to school, the lack of in-person preschool was bearing fruit. This new generation of students–unsocialized, feral–would climb onto counters, crab crawl under the tables, throw chairs, even strike other children and adults. It became difficult to love these wild children. A few teachers took early retirement. But not her. Her new pity-tinged love remained. The children were there for her to love.
Another scream. An adult.
Another wild child ran beyond her wall of windows. The child howled. She sensed anger in the cry, not pain, despite the blood that was flying off the student’s exposed right-hand fingertip bones. This bloody digits had something caught in them: a long black braid with a clump of scalp. A rainbow ribbon hung from the claws, like a trout in the talons of a hawk. Ruby. She swallowed the bile, but she didn’t dare close her eyes. She wanted to avoid seeing that in her mind.
The usual running, screaming children were called “lopers” by the office staff. This was short for “elopers,” but the teachers called them “runners.” They weren’t sneaking off like lovers escaping parents or society. These children, just like the one who had just passed her window, made it known they were on the loose.
She glanced at her watch. 4:07.
Because of the nationwide epidemic of school shootings and the lockdown drills which followed, every gate on campus was locked. Thus, in striving for the mythical “least restrictive environment,” runners became an accepted part of campus. More like the path of least resistance, Mrs. Goodman thought. The administration allowed the runners to run the campus, the inmates the asylum. It became standard policy since the “’lopers” didn’t get far because they couldn’t get out, except for one child last year who scrambled over the fence and showed up at her older sister’s high school 20 minutes later. But that runner was an exception, not the rule.
These days, however, there were no rules. You had children running through the halls, screaming. A few classrooms sustained damage before the office did all they thought they could: announce a Level Two Lockdown. Locked doors, no immediate danger. Just kids roaming the halls, banging on doors, demanding to be let into any room that wasn’t theirs. She chided herself for not having retired last June. Grunts from the closet behind her reset her focus.
No, the children are all I have left. Plus, today had been a delightful day. Her two biggest behavior problems, the boys who would jump onto and run across the countertops, throw tantrums and then toys, were both absent. In retrospect, that seemed uncanny to her now. Did it have something to do with the lunchroom rumor that school-wide attendance was down by ten percent today?
A good day? Too good to be true.
“Just you wait,” the fates whispered in her head, the chorus in a Greek tragedy.
She felt growing pressure against the closet door, against her back. Almost pulsing.
Another scream pierced the air from somewhere else on campus, then the dank cloud of silence settled on the school, her classroom, and her thoughts again. She glanced again at her smartwatch. It blinked at her. Dummy. Call someone.
Call John.
But he was gone. He had been gone for over a year now, lost when the last big swell of the pandemic swept through.
Pressing her back against the closet and her mind against her memories, her breath rattled and shook, and tears formed in the inner corners of her eye, welling, growing, until they bulged at the bottom of the curve of her lower eyelid. A single tear rolled down the left side of her face. She pressed her head against the door, wanting to give up. It would be so easy. Just let go. She snapped herself out of it. Okay, who do I call?
She tried the school office number, whispering the digits into the smartwatch.
All circuits are busy. Strange. To the office? Impossible, but then she remembered this wasn’t an internal phone line.
It was an external call, so anything was possible, and in this world of cellular phones, you couldn’t always be guaranteed an easy connection. Her eyes landed on the phone resting on her teaching table. Damnit. She paused, wondering what else she could do.
Lock the door behind me.
She reached behind herself with her right hand to search for the lock. She looked to the left and right. The closets on either side had locks. Just my luck. This closet, full-length and double-doored, was the only closet across the back bank of doors that didn’t have a lock. As she looked up to God, her eyes stopped at the big table. Not that the lock would help at all. Not with my keys across the room. Damn.
She scanned the room for something she could slide through the handles of the closet doors to hold them in place, to not allow them to open out into the classroom. The window opener with the six-foot-long metal extender-bar lay on the floor in the center of the room. She closed her eyes, and in that blink of her eye, the last five minutes came flooding back, bloody, overwhelming.
First, there had been a scream from another classroom in the wing of the building. Not just the usual playful screeches of children at play, not what she was used to hearing in these afternoons.
The after-school program met in a classroom that had been abandoned by an early retiree. A kid, just out of high school herself, had taken over. Ruby was adorable, with her long black hair braided and always tied off with a rainbow ribbon. A nice enough kid, but in way over her head. Essentially no classroom management. Every day was a rumble and roar from that room. So much so that the two teachers on either side of the after-school room vacated the campus the moment the union-mandated workday ended at 3:30. Sometimes even earlier, since the daily after-school armageddon started at 2:55.
At 4:00, Mrs. Goodman had been one of the few teachers left on this end of campus. Then that scream.
That scream was different. Wrong. An adult.
She remembered looking at her watch. Four o’clock. If John had still been alive, she could have called him, asked him to come and pick her up. Heck, in another hour he would have called her to see what she wanted for dinner. Only now he’s gone.
She shook her head and continued surveying the room for something to bar the doors when another scream pierced the silence. Another adult. Male this time.
The earlier scream had stopped so short that Mrs. Goodman assumed one of the students, one of the feral children, had scared the after-school program coordinator, and that was that. This new scream didn’t stop short. This one stretched on, starting first as a screech, then a wail, and now it pulsed in the air as if something was causing many screams to chorus in rhythmical waves.
Like a siren. A siren song.
Mrs. Goodman swayed and turned her head to the rhythm of the wailing in her memory. She wanted to make it stop. She closed her eyes. But that was worse because then she saw again what she had seen.
The siren wail grew louder, and the thudding behind her snatched her from her stupor.
At 4:01, the child had charged into her classroom. She had left her doors open, something that most teachers were no longer doing because of the elopers from the after-school program.
She had cursed her own stupidity. Her room sweltered, and her top row of windows didn’t close easily, so she kept them closed and left her doors open to circulate the warm autumnal air. The child had stormed the room, screaming, angry, demanding. He screamed, “Tablet!”
She stood at the big table, glancing up from the next day’s art project. Confused, she stared at the charging boy. “Tablet!” The scream was almost hoarse. Who? She searched her memory. It took a second before she remembered him. Gabriel. He was a first grader, one of last year’s more rambunctious kinders. She remembered him crab-crawling under the tables and lifting them off the ground, scaring the other children. “TABLET!” More of a screech. She wondered if Gabriel was confused, thinking she was still his teacher. She looked at him, hoping to see the cherub face from last year. Poor baby.
He appeared as an avenging angel, his face masked with what she could only describe as wrath.
Guttural, the child roared; he wanted his tablet. She knelt at his level and opened her arms to him, thinking her hug could calm him. Instead, he sprinted towards her, bowed his head, and hit her in the shoulder at full speed with the crown of his skull, knocking her onto her back. He stood over her and cried, “Taaaaaableeeeeeeet!”
She tried to interpret this new tone. Pain? Frustration? Need?
No.
Weird. It sounds like triumph.
She reached up to him, hoping to soothe him, or at least to see if he might reach down to help her up. “Gabriel,” she said, wishing to convey affection and care, not the terror overcoming her. She smiled as calmly as she could and reached out, extending both arms wide.
“Gabriel, come here. Do you need a hug?”
He stood over her, face shaking, staring down at her, screaming the word “tablet” over and over. She reached up to him to take his hand to soothe him, and he kicked her in the side.
She cried out in pain, but she couldn’t get air back into her lungs. He continued kicking her until she folded in on herself. He paused in his assault. He tilted his head and studied her. He growled. He paused. He blinked. Mrs. Goodman panted, rolling onto her back in short, slow movements, testing her body for pain and injury. She looked up at him. She turned her head left and right to unlock her neck.
He dropped onto her chest, knees first, his hands around her throat, squeezing. “Tablet tablet tablet,” he repeated. The sounds became less distinct. “Tab-leh… tah-leh… tah tah…” His voice sounded both emotionless and pleading.
She could not breathe. Her vision dimmed. Was she dying? If so, this would be her last thought: This is one of those children who had never been told “No.”
She shook her head, unable to say “no” to him now, either. He unclenched his hands around her throat a little, and she gasped, relieved, thinking Thank God that’s over. He jumped to his feet and kicked her again. He growled at her then walked over to one of the smaller student tables, the one he used to sit at last year. He pointed his finger and jabbed it at the electronic smartboard. She shook her head, not understanding. He turned from her and walked to the toy box and picked up a large wooden block from it. He turned back toward her. She cried soundless sobs, tears running from her eyes. “Gabriel” stopped at the student table, and Mrs. Goodman watched in horror as he placed his right hand on the table, took the wood block with his left hand, and slammed it onto the fingertips of his right hand. A wet crunch. Blood spurted onto the table.
She cried out, “No, don’t!” She scrambled, struggling to get to him to stop him from hurting himself. He craned his head up from his hand and stared at her, smiling behind closed lips, blood running from the middle three fingertips of his right hand. He dropped the bloody block of wood to the floor. He grinned at her, peeling his lips back, baring his “first graders’ gap,” the missing front baby teeth on the top and bottom. Without even looking at his hands, he brought the broken fingertips up to the side of his mouth. One by one, he bit down on the fingertip then tore the broken tip away from the rest of the finger. He spat each onto the ground. Blood pulsed from the open ends of his fingers. The tip removal complete, he grinned through his bloody lips, the teeth on his right side stained red. It might have been funny if it weren’t so horrifying. In short, delicate moves, as if he had done this before, he slid the gore, the soft muscles, and the skin of each of those three fingers up toward the base of his hand. It reminded her of her late husband pushing up the arms of his Duke sweatshirt so that they wouldn’t get wet when he reached into the post-dinner sink of dishes.
She stood up. “Gabriel,” she said, her voice nothing more than a rasp. Whatever had been Gabriel turned and met her gaze. She froze.
Blood dripped from the jagged ends of his fingers sticking out. Even through the crimson, she could see the white of those exposed bones. She couldn’t decide whether to go to the phone to call the office, or to stop the child, grab his hands, hold him, hug him, love him, soothe him. What can I do for him?
In that moment of frozen indecisiveness, “Gabriel” grunted then charged her.
He tried to stab her with his exposed spiky fingertips. At the last second, she moved her arm in almost a fencer’s parry to the child’s lunge, reducing his thrust to only a glancing blow, a tear across her side. She jumped to the opposite direction and looked down. Blood spread across her blouse.
He charged her again, growling. There was no more language. Just growls and grunts. Feral.
He chased her throughout the room. She ran around the smaller student tables, pulling the crayon and tool baskets off them as she passed, even flipping over the back table, hoping to impede him. She grabbed the board book My Mama Is a Llama and tried to use it as a shield. The wild child stabbed his bone talons through the book. It is trying to kill me. No, it’s still Gabriel. He knows I love him. The student flung the book aside with a flick of the wrist. She began to pant for breath on her second pass of the class when she noticed the long window-opener leaning in the far windowsill.
She headed for it. Then she noticed something.
It’s quiet. Dead silent.
She grabbed the six-foot-long metal bar from the windowsill and turned.
The wild child had seemed to calm, standing at the smartboard. He ran his uninjured left hand over its surface. A screen. A big tablet. He attempted to do what he had seen her do every day of last year.
She took advantage of the respite and crept toward the teaching table, staying out of his peripheral line of sight. “Gabriel” was poking at the whiteboard with its claws. No time to lose. She picked up the telephone receiver.
The wild child was losing its calm, growing agitated by the screen’s non-response to its touches and commands. It roared.
She looked at the phone’s touchpad and pressed the first key.
A buzzer sounded, and the ceiling’s intercom switched on with an electronic cough. Mrs. Goodman looked up at the speaker as a stressed voice squeaked. “We are now in a Level One Lockdown. Lock your doors and shelter in place.” Then, as if to answer the unnecessary question: “This is not a drill! THIS IS NOT–” The wet sounds of impact followed the unintelligible shriek that ended the announcement.
She heard the roar again.
That roar is getting louder. Closer. She looked down to find what used to be “Gabriel” within a table’s length from her. My God. That’s not Gabriel. Not anymore. It was charging with its talons pointed at her heart. She swung the bar, and it caught the demon child on the side of the head and threw him off balance and onto the floor.
Before she could turn back to the phone, the feral thing was up and charging again.
Mrs. Goodman took off again. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the night custodian running outside, yelling. Behind him were three more of these things, their right hands as bloody bayonets, giving chase.
I can’t outrun it.
She led it around the room. She kept swinging the bar to distance herself, but the chase was on and relentless. She tried to remember which of the three closets at the back of the room still had space in it. She might hide or at least barricade herself in it.
The middle one. That’s the one. That’s the one with enough space.
It was gaining on her. One more swing of the bar might slow the feral beast enough to give her enough space to get into the closet.
She heard a high-pitched scream and saw the custodian stumble, the little ones on him, stabbing–
She looked away and swung the bar at what used to be Gabriel.
It caught hold of the bar with its left hand. The window opener didn’t budge in its grasp.
She released it, hearing it clang to the floor as she sprinted for the closet.
It was roaring, charging behind her.
She peeked inside the door. Damnit. There was no way she could fit in the closet. She turned back toward the charging beast, knowing that within two seconds it would skewer her.
At the very last possible instant, she stepped aside, pulling the closet door like a toreador, and the feral animal ran into the closet, and she slammed the door shut. She pressed her back against it.
She panted for breath, staring at the six-foot window-opener on the floor. The sirens broke her reverie. The beast pressed against the door, trying to get out, pounding on the door, grunting–she assumed–for its tablet. Through the windows, she saw the bleeding janitor on the ground, three members of Generation Feral on him, stabbing his still body with their bony little talons.
Mrs. Goodman felt the scratching from the other side of the door.
She didn’t have to whisper 9-1-1 into her smartwatch. Tires screeched to a stop outside. The sirens cut off with an abrupt silence.
The police are here. We’re safe.
Then she felt the fingers, the bones, the points, the weapons, push through the closet door and into her back. Again. And again.
She fell forward onto the floor and heard the closet doors burst open behind her. Their slamming sounded like gunshots.
And again. And again.
Her throat was too hoarse to speak or cry.
I’ll see you soon, John. I will see you very very soon.
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About
Bill Walthall is a southern California-based writer of fantasy and horror. He has published two short stories: “The Kitsune” (under the pseudonym A.K. Amesworth) in the collection Darker than Noir; and “Shadeland” in the August 2025 issue of Black Sheep magazine.
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